Television is one of the most popular communication mediums today. In fact, television has become so popular that more information is being broadcast every day than is possible for any one person to assimilate. Therefore, television viewers frequently desire to search out television programs that are related to a specific topic of interest. For example, a viewer may want to locate television programs related to a particular animal such as a bear, a particular country such as India, or a particular government agency such as the police. However, locating specific television programs which pertain to a desired topic is difficult and time consuming. It is virtually impossible to quickly locate a specific topic across hundreds of television stations broadcasting thousands of different types of shows by scanning through the various television channels. Therefore, a need exists for an apparatus and method to searching through the multitude of television channels and the multitude of programming on those channels by which a viewer could enter specific keyword terms into a search engine and then view a list of programming related to the entered terms that would be provided by search engine.
Similarly, the Internet is a very popular medium for communication of information. As it is impossible for anybody to obtain all of the information on the Internet, search engines have proved invaluable in allowing users to access specific information on the Internet. Since many television viewers are familiar with the Internet and Internet search engines, there exists a need for an apparatus and method for searching through television programming similar to the method that search engines use for searching through the Internet.
Such technology is known in the art. U.S. Pat. No. 5,481,296 issued on Jan. 2, 1996 discloses an “Apparatus and Method for Selectively Viewing Video Information.” However, the '296 patent does not disclose an improved method for searching for keywords within the closed captioning text. Additionally, the '296 patent does not disclose a method for searching for synonyms of the desired keywords. Furthermore, while the '296 patent discloses a method for searching for keywords in video signals, the '296 patent does not disclose a method of evaluating the effectiveness of the returned search items.
Therefore, a need exists for an apparatus and method for searching television programming which will enable the user to enter keywords and view a list of programming which is related to the keywords. A need also exists for an apparatus and method which is capable of searching for synonyms of the keywords. Finally, a need exists for an apparatus and method which will evaluate the returned search items and inform the user as to the relevancy of each returned item.